Fantasy cartography

Redrawing the map of Europe

FROM our archives, we invite you to imagine a world in which countries could move as easily as people. View our suggestions for a rearranged Europe in this videographic, which was originally published on May 20th 2010.

Better than all the fantasy map videos on Youtube, Im afraid often made by American teenagers/conspiracy theorists which show Europe being overrun by inexplicably resurgent communism, Naziism or Muslims.

Well that is a complete bullsh*t! Nothing more than an exaggeration and an extrapolation of stupid stereotypes and clichés. Southern Italy is treated as a mess (bordello), and has to stay that way, rich Switzerland goes with rich North, Russia is - of course, what else could it be? - the evil not-Europe, and lucky Britain stays a careless island under any circumstances. Maybe it would be better to put the Brits in the central Europe, so they might learn some manners...

Aside from the rude comment on Southern Italy, the idea is funny. The idea could be well extended involving other continents and nations.

Canada, England and the Falklands could move to place near Australia and New Zealand, making for a huge British Archipelago. The remaining parts of the UK have less obvious destinations: Wales perhaps should become the Blessed Land of Celtic tradition and go to the West of Ireland; the Isle of Man and Scotland, with their
Nordic traditions, could go the middle of the North Sea; Northern Ireland could go to Eastern Mediterraneum, near the islands of Cyprus, Greece, Lebanon, and Bosnia.

Argentina should be moved to the North Atlantic, somehere at the East of the Azores, becoming fully European.

Armenia, Georgia, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka and Israel should form an archipelago of nations with ancient religions, right on the middle of the Indian Ocean (perhaps Mount Athos could also go there). Jamaican Rastafarians perhaps would also want to move their country to that archipelago.

Cuba and Mexico should be placed right on the center of the empty space left by Argentina. They and the USA would almost certainly enjoy the separation. The USA would then be a gigantic island, as Canada would also have moved.

The Philipines should move away from the dangerous Chinese and go to the West of Indonesia.

Err ... Croatia "Ideally ruled by a Doge from Venice"?? Anyone remember how that worked out last time? No thanks!! What an idiotic exercise this whole thing is. Someone clearly has too much time on their hands.

If you wish upon a star, does not matter who you are -- you can share your fantasies with the rest of the world. I have a dream recently with a homeland for the homosexuals, promised and guaranteed by a sympathetic power, deserved not because of some illusory persecution, but because they pester so much their fellow countrypeople with their requests of collective rights that they truly merit to build their own state from scratch, in all freedom from all obscurantist residue that so unjustly clutters their legitimate aspirations... Its territory might be located in a hot area of the globe, e.g. Sahara, thus the vestimentary inhibitions might be abolished and some degree of public body interaction could be constitutionally permitted and/or guaranteed. (Extra details from my dream might not suit the tastes of some readers, alas.)

In the real world, however, the states and state territory you will always have with you, and with them come cultural clashes at the borders. A world state is not for tomorrow to be seen. Clustering together territories of nations with cultural affinities is not feasible (Alfred Wegener un-clustered Africa from South America on the map, but that took millennia to happen in real life.), and of course the solution would be that people get along and states keep their borders as open as possible. If peoples don’t get along, the borders will be closed once again, problems will be discussed within nations, in their national tongues, and the nations’ representatives will discuss the problems at the international level; in the end a solution would presumably be found… However, trying to skip the steps would only create disorder at the mentioned international level, of 9/11 type, with thugs flowing freely across unchecked border points.

All nations would prefer to be isolated from each other, so that they would not have to worry about other nations.
But barring that condition....
Small nations would be joined in a single continent where they would always be at war, killing humans like animals, which humans are.
Large nations having promised away their morals and respect of human life would separate themselves into islands to voice their opposition of the "small nation working class."
And medium-sized nations, logically, would interpose themselves between the two; but why bother getting involved. Instead they would move as far away from the others as possible and as near to the tropics as they could.
The land north of the North Sea will cease to be.

Spanish will have become the world's central language. All people will have admitted to being at least a small part Muslim. "I love this song!" will be the universally poorest thing to say. And the Olympics will be held on the Moon so athletes can jump and throw things much farther. How far? I dunno, I'm just here to bust george custer.

Does george custer have a perversion predicament to share with The Economist? Your mind's thread is so raveled but the little end has been found. If only there were a surgeon to carefully unravel it with the latest technological equipment, say an electron microscope and a pair of nano-tweezers? You yourself have no doubt wondered. But here you are tugging on it, tightening it, forever sealing the knot of your airtight mind. Whoever you are.
Why burden the working class with your misery and "pestering?"

We are each called to be the judge, jury, and executioner of this world; but how many of us will stand up to such a terrific obligation as that... and so we must watch each other for any discrepancy; and together preserve ourselves from the immoral. All gays are degeneratively motivated creatures.

Measure george custer's neck for the gallows, I say.

His second paragraph could have read, "And that's who I am. Luckily I live in America and not Syria. Luckily I'm a silly person, and not an honor bound member of the human race. Luckily The Economist is not an Investigatory Bureau."
Sleep with one eye open, *eor*e *u**er.

II never said that "gays" (you might notice that I prefer the older and unambiguous term "homosexual", if only to safely refer to works like "The Gay Purry", which do not have anything to do with homosexuals) are "degeneratively motivated creatures". As long as they did not pester the world with their absurd request of homosexual "marriage" (a union purely dedicated for recreational sex, instead of reproductive sex, for which the institution of marriage was thought), deemed to keep divorce lawyers in business since feminism has managed to considerably dwindle down the number of heterosexual marriages performed, I was actually neutral-to-friendly to homosexuals. (Even now I have mixed feelings into what did I step…) However, I do believe that this burden to civil legislation constitutes a lot of red tape for the accumulation of wealth, if only thinking to how the oh-so-difficult to accumulate wealth will have to be once again divided once a newly-dubbed "spouse" will decide to opt out of the union and look for better opportunities. As you might notice I see this legislative demand as a pure way to enlarge the range of ways people accumulate wealth, lest a direct demand for nationalisation is yet out of discussion. This is one reason why this piece of legislation acts as a redistributive, if not Marxist instrument. Another one would be the typically ideological manner, full of hatred, proponents of homosexual "marriage" act out when pretending to promote their ideas -- it surely reminds one of Lenin and his followers. This is ironical, since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, of whom homosexual "marriage" is the latest bright idea, was tolerated just as a substitute for socialism ("make love not war" - or revolution), but again, in the eyes of the followers this cause does deserve a barricade.

Once you spoke up your mind of how the objectors to homosexual "marriage" should be treated (have you considered the stake? In the Middle Ages a stake - in wood or red-hot iron - was forced on some felons, e.g., Edward II of England), you make an interesting point on Syria. My feeling is that the Syrian pro-democracy promoters are the victims of the wider geopolitical game that takes place in the region, i.e. the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and any resolution condemning Asad's regime is being turned down at UN by Russia and China not only out of ideological solidarity, but also because US supports Israel, and such resolution might be construed as a support of Israel. Going back to the Wegener game suggested above, I wonder how territorial rearrangements of this kind would act for the Middle East.

George custer gives a strong reply in the thread three posts below. The subject is more of that 'homosexualism of the world' that has built a fortress among us. George's defense is solid, but if I may attack at it a bit...

Although the post is trivial, still it would be clumsy to say that anyone who read george's post did not pause at the breadth of scope characterized, and george does try to refrain from being exceedingly grandiose, but there is the premonition of an ironic threat insinuated in the stealth of it, or rather a noticeable explosion of gayness! Making a public confession in The Economist is a more graphic form of disturbing evidence than there would be if the culprit had remained silent. The working class of the world demands justice in the cases of so many like george that I thought I'd discuss their contingency.

Unfortunately all attacks lose energy; they grow less accurate and powerful as their attacker wears down. Purpose gives way to confusion, and after a while the attacker leaves off the attack. It's a path of quantities.
This does not mean the battle was unresolved or that the attacker has given up. But it takes work to win. What if george wins? What if george's declamations prevail? What if george flees like a fugitive? This too is a path of quantites.

Let me introduce a theory that statements are of two types, Imperative and Commitant. Imperative statements exist when their authority is certain, for instance a manual that describes how to make a repair on a car. "Remove this.... Tighten that....," Each paragraph and each chapter of Imperative statements is reliably accurate. Commitant statements are issued by a questionable source and therefore must be tested by the reader (this post for instance) before they are given any validity. A token confidence is granted to each of the statements made, and if they fail to meet the criterion for further confidence they are invalidated. Usually the reader makes a mental attempt to quarantine each invalidated statement from the rest of the paragraph to maintain a core of useful material if there is any. No, no one trusts george custer, so the statements are not Imperative. Definitely they are Commitant and must be tested. There is no inherent humor in this process; no one can afford to make real commitments in an unbiased way. If you don't have an opinion there's someone to give you one.
Right from the outset you know that you may be reading a confession and have to suppress the content and contextual information of george's statements. All of george's words are just the obvious way to reach the destination at the end of the paragraph, and george is nothing more than an ideal hunting target. The case against george is a proprietary one that any moral individual would make. The wasted time spent crafting a full-bodied composition with a life of its own, filling the period of our attention span with as many literary bits and bytes of fantasy as possible, could have been spent in productive work; instead we must deal with this human burden.
You may understand the words of a language like English or Spanish, but you do not necessarily have to: Yes may mean No; Big may mean Small; Si may mean No; etcetera. You may believe an author's words have been compiled into a dense structure to evoke an honest impression. This was not george's intention. Suppression destroys the meaning of quarantined statements in this manner, progressively making them less distinctive and more dependent on their structure and organization. Some parts of the structure are strong and some of it is merely superficial. Suppression disables alot of that superfice and your comprehension of the remainder is generally very accurate. I'm not psychic, but george custer is after something with an economy of force... the chance to revel in deviance. Among devils - this is the intellectual property of george custer's mind - a libatious, feigned hostility. What seems evident is that george custer is gay and bloated with vice. This george denies. (Three posts prior to this one.) Personally I'd keep a crosshair's distance away from being near or even understanding them.

In this The Economist forum, there is not much penalty for expressing any sector of the mind that a person possesses. If the words themselves are offensive then the post is merely disposed. But if the ideas are offensive then they are mechanically tolerated by The Economist. Despite these obstacles you are obligated to be a moral individual. Could inaccuracy lead a person so far in a poor direction that they would choose the penalties for irresponsibility over the rewards of responsibility? Knowing the answer to be one of countless examples, we must have the commonsense to enforce the value of our lives. Little does this have to do with fantasy cartography.

Very imaginative.
You may be interested to know that there was a book entitled: “Redrawing the Map of Europe” by Michael Emerson (Antony Rowe: UK 1998 and St Martin’s Press: USA, 1998) Mr. Emerson was the EU’s first Ambassador to the Soviet Union and then to Russia. The first part of the book dissects Europe’s contradictory capacity for both enlightened integration and savage conflict.
The book has 20 detailed maps, ranging from Roman times to Europe’s minorities in 1998. His map of “the Roman Empire (AD 100)” omits part of the North Africa coast and some of the Asian parts of the Empire, but the book was very interesting reading.
(I was careful to compose this comment in MS Word, as the last time I composed one on your website, it was repeated 4 times!)

You will be satisfied to see that I am not a fugitive, and I am coming back. I have actually a couple of questions/observations on the margin of your text -- please allow me to share them with you.

First, I do not understand: first you say that "george custer believes that all gays are degeneratively motivated individuals", then you say, as a conclusion of a long, tedious paragraph in which text-related evidence is completely missing, that "george custer is gay". Apart from the implicit observation that my pen name should be capitalised, for which I am grateful and have since addressed, these excerpts lead to the conclusion that I think of myself as a "degeneratively motivated individual", which can hardly make any sense. Either one or both of the premises are wrong.

Then you twice request my death -- "measure george custer's neck for the gallows", "crosshairs distance" -- but in doing that you forget that, unlike Alice's Cheshire cat, I only have one life, and consequently can be executed only once. Or maybe you just want to turn in to some "Investigative Bureau"?

Last but not least, a good idea would be to check your text for spellings: I did not find in any dictionary the word “Commitant”. Think of me as slow but I found this a great impediment to the understanding of the paragraph in which it appears.

These are a few of my favourite things in relation to your text. Except for the personal attacks culminating to death threats, it makes excellent reading. If you don’t feel that you “waste your time crafting a full-bodied composition”, do keep it coming! Thank you again for the suggestion of capitalising my name.